the end of protestA new playbook for revolution

Interviews on THE END OF PROTEST by Micah White

Is protest broken? Micah White, co-creator of Occupy Wall Street, thinks so. Recent years have witnessed the largest protests in human history. Yet these mass mobilizations no longer change society. Now activism is at a crossroads: innovation or irrelevance.

DORIAN WARREN: The saying used to be in the 60s, 70s, 80s: “From protest to politics.” And you just mentioned the term governance, so it is not only about protesting but also wielding power and governing. How different is that from previous movements in American history?

MICAH WHITE: Well, I think the main difference that we’re seeing today is that social movements are starting to function without leaders. And so whereas before you saw a reliance on charismatic individual such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King who became the leaders of movements, today we’re seeing that ideas and memes are becoming the leader. The people follow the ideas that are the best. And so the challenge now is how to have a leaderless movement that is also able to do things that are traditionally associated with having leaders. Traditionally only a leader-based movement could elect itself into power. Instead, now we’re thinking about how could a social movement elect itself into power.

DORIAN WARREN: Let me push back on that. When you say leaderless… someone is organizing protests, someone is doing the work of mobilizing people, there are people who are followed on social media… so when you say leaderless is that really, really true? Or do you mean, relative to older social movements there is not one, publicly visible leader? Versus, there are leaders in the movement doing organizing work. Because I don’t want to just assume that all this is spontaneous.

MICAH WHITE: Absolutely, it is not spontaneous. This is an interesting thing to think about. Even today, people tell me: “you didn’t create Occupy Wall Street!” But what leaderless means is that the way you create social movements today is that you make an idea that other people take up as their own. And they actually don’t even know where the idea came from. During Occupy Wall Street, people didn’t know where the idea for Occupy Wall Street came from. They didn’t know Adbusters, they didn’t know who I was. And so what it means to be leaderless today is that the ideas are taken up by the participants, guided by the participants and shaped by the participants. And the participants themselves have more control over the movement than the persons who named the movement. You can go and find out who named Black Lives Matter. But those people don’t have control over the movement. Just like Adbusters and I didn’t have control over Occupy Wall Street. Once we created that protest meme, it went out of our hands and the people took control of it.

DORIAN WARREN: When you zoom out and look at the entire progressive landscape, are there similarities you see across the progressive movement in terms of protest and activism today?

MICAH WHITE: That’s a good question. The important thing to realize today is that all protests are part of the same protest and all movements are part of the same movement. What we’re seeing happen right now is that although people orient around specific policy issues, what is really at stake here is that the people are trying to gain control of the world. The people, the 99%, are trying to get into a political position where if they want, for example, a $15/hour minimum wage or LGBT rights, they have that. Instead of demanding from our elected representatives, we are the elected representatives. The specific movements are just a manifestation of the larger, deeper situation: we’re heading toward a time when a social movement is going to gain global governance, in order to solve the global challenges facing us all—like climate change, income inequality, gender inequality. We’re going to have to build a social movement that can win elections in multiple countries in order to carry out a unified geopolitical agenda. So these local policy issues are just manifestations of the same sacred, and eternal, struggle for planetary power.